The OpenAI smartphone will fail, but it’ll be good for iPhone users

Source: 9to5Mac

The past few days have seen conflicting views from AI companies about the future of smartphones. Perplexity thinks AI will only benefit iPhones, while OpenAI reportedly believes its own smartphone could render them obsolete.

I would bet heavily that the OpenAI smartphone will either never materialize or will be a commercial failure, but the attempt is still good news for iPhone users…

Perplexity: AI won’t disrupt the iPhone

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas doesn’t think AI presents a threat to the iPhone; quite the reverse.

The phone, the iPhone is actually not getting disrupted by AI at all. In fact, the more AI works better, the iPhone essentially becomes your digital passport.

He says the iPhone is central to the ways we live our lives, and that isn’t going to change.

OpenAI smartphone

If a Ming‑Ching Kuo report is accurate, OpenAI disagrees with this assertion. He suggests the company is working on its own smartphone.

OpenAI is collaborating with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone processors, with Luxshare as the exclusive system co‑design and manufacturing partner. Mass production is expected in 2028.

The concept is that the operating system will be based on AI agents instead of apps. In other words, you won’t open a specific app to achieve a task – you will delegate the task to an AI agent.

OpenAI will be partially right … eventually

In principle, I think OpenAI is correct in its belief that humans have tasks they want to achieve, and that apps are simply one possible tool we can use.

I’d love to be able to simply pick up my iPhone, tell Siri what I actually want to achieve, and then receive confirmation a few seconds or minutes later that the task has been done. For example, tell Siri to book a trip, knowing that it has all my preferences for airlines, plane seats, hotels, etc.; that it can apply my frequent‑flyer miles; that it has access to my calendar to ensure the timings work; and so on.

We will likely get there eventually, and once we do the concept of human‑accessed apps will be at least partly redundant. However, this isn’t going to happen by 2028. Given the school‑boy errors made by AI systems at present, it will be a very long time before I trust an agent to handle anything important, let alone something as ambitious as managing travel plans.

Even when it does eventually happen, this doesn’t mean we’ll abandon our iPhones. The Apple ecosystem will become even more important in an interconnected world, and the appeal of Apple’s privacy‑focused approach will only increase.

But I hope it happens

Although I think an OpenAI smartphone would flop, I would be very happy to see the company make the attempt. It’ll accelerate the shift beyond apps toward agentic AI‑delegated tasks, and it’ll push Apple to go further and faster in this direction.

We won’t be giving up our iPhones, but they will get smarter, faster with this kind of competitive pressure.

Photo by Andrey Matveev on Unsplash